


Whispers

by PaladinofFarore



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 18:57:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13507749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaladinofFarore/pseuds/PaladinofFarore
Summary: "I always saw myself rescuing a beautiful princess," Mike told his daughter on his lap. "Like in the stories I loved. Joke was on me. Because when the princess showed up, she saved me instead."Mike waits with his daughter Anna for El to come home from a dangerous job.  With the snow and memories to keep them company





	Whispers

The December night was cold and windy. 

Snow blanketed Indiana, covering the highways and the whole of Indianapolis in ice. Roads were backed up. Schools would be closed tomorrow, and sledding would dominate the lives of children for the better part of a week. 

Mike Wheeler sat in his living room, worrying. 

Sparks died in the fireplace beside him, casting shadows over the photos that lined the mantle.

He gripped the arms of his chair, tapping his foot incessantly. 

He hated this. Hated hated hated.

Ever since the year between the fall of 83 and 84, he had despised waiting. It clawed at him. Eroded him. Made him start to forget who he was. 

It had only been a few hours since she’d left, but the feelings of the young boy who’d spent a year grieving and waiting had already taken root again. 

“I’ll be back,” El had said, pressing a kiss to his lips. “I promise.”

That should have been enough. El didn’t break promises.

But anxiety was toxic. It melted the parts of you that reminded you of common sense and made the people you love seem distant and unreal.

So he waited. Afraid. 

The call had come shortly after dinner time. 

He’d been doing dishes and El had been playing with Anna. He’d smiled and watched from the corner of his eye as his girls played.

El made blocks and toy animals dance across the carpet with a twirl of her fingers and Anna giggled, flinging her tiny hands out and sending whatever was within her reach flying.

Their daughters powers were coming in strong, even at only two years old. They’d been terrified of course.

But their fears had been tempered by a few swift words from Hopper. 

“She’ll have a teacher,” he’d told his daughter and son in law over lunch. “How to control it. Hide it, if she needs to. She’ll be alright.”

And she was. Better than alright even. 

The phone rang as Anna sent a toy donkey soaring across the living room and onto the couch. 

Laughing, El rose to answer the phone. 

A moment later her face turned cold as stone. 

“When?” She asked, eyes darting between her husband and daughter. 

Mike set down the plate he’d been scrubbing and turned.

El tugged at her hair.

She always did that when she was frazzled. A few moments passed.

“Alright,” She said, resigned. “I’ll be there.”

She hung up without another word. The phone clicked hard against the wall. 

“What was that?” Mike asked. 

Anna had started trying to make her animals dance. Instead they spun around on the floor like tops. 

“Owens,” his wife replied, sounding suddenly very, very tired. “A rift opened. Castleton. They need me to go in.”

Mikes heart sank in his chest. He did his best to hide it but it almost certainly showed on his face. 

Rifts. Miniature gates opened by whatever forces the DOE experiments had stirred in the Upside Down. They’d been a semi regular occurrence over the years. Though they usually shut themselves. FiZling our after a time. 

“A big one?”

She nodded grimly.

“Big enough for something to come out. That’s why they called. They’ve closed off the area, but more are coming.”

He nodded, stepping forward and placing a hand on her shoulder. 

They’d had a shaky relationship with the government over the years. Owens they trusted. He’d shown genuine remorse and compassion and had done what he could to help El live a normal life. 

On the other hand, Owens was far from representative of government entities as a whole. 

There were plenty who still wanted a piece of 011. Reviled as he was publicly, Martin Brenners work was widely admired in certain circles. 

Some had even approached them. 

Mike had almost sorry for the poor guy. Newly graduated and interning for a prominent scientist, held approached them with seemingly genuine intentions. 

People were always taken aback by how ferocious El could be. 

She was usually quiet and polite, nice. 

The fact that she barely stood at 5’6” made it all the more shocking how scary she could be. 

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Terrence,” she’d said with a voice Mike had recognized as barely restrained rage. “But if you and any of yours come here again, I’ll kill each and every one of you myself.”

Mike had thought the boy would piss himself. 

The boy hadn’t really deserved it. But then again, he’d asked to examine a newborn Anna, and there was nothing El was more protective of. 

Not even Mike himself.

Much as she loathed the government, there were exceptions to everything. 

One of them was the Upside Down.

Her powers were one of the few proven weapons against its denizens (that didn’t involve being possessed). Flamethrowers and soldiers worked, sort of, but nothing else had proven as proficient at closing rifts between the realms. 

So when one opened, they called. 

She’d gone each time. Never happily, but out of a sense of what she felt was duty. 

The government could go fuck itself. But that didn’t mean that innocent people deserved to die just because they were caught in the crossfire. 

Until now they had been minor events. 

Small openings that took a moment to close through which nothing had gotten through. 

Tonight was different. 

This time the rift was the size of a large jeep, and it had been opened in Castleton, one of the busiest shopping centers in all of Indianapolis. Early reports indicated that no less than three Demogorgons had been sighted. 

She had to go. 

Whether she or Mike liked it or not. 

She’d had to leave quickly. 

Disappearing into the bedroom for a few moments, she emerged dressed in her long gray coat, carrying the orange face mask she wore for such occasions. 

Psionic plexy was it’s proper name. 

It kept her eyes from bleeding should she exert too much power, and it filtered her breathing. The Upside Down could still do harm to the body. 

Then she’d left. Kissing her husband and daughter goodbye and departing into the snow. 

Now, hours later Mike waited in the living room. 

Waiting again. Just as painful as always. 

Anna had gone to bed an hour ago, and now all he had for company was the steady snowfall outside the window. He’d made a few calls. Hopper and Joyce had been the first. They were only an hour south in Hawkins, but the weather kept them from coming to join him. 

Will and Jeremy had been next. They were further, in Chicago, but he knew his best friend and brother in law would be on the next flight if the situation turned sour. 

Kali had been last. Her number wasn’t always reliable. She never stayed in the same place at once, but this time he’d gotten lucky. 

“She called me herself,” the illusionist had told him. “I’ll be there by morning.” 

Mike sighed and took of his glasses.

In that moment he was a little boy again crouching in a pillowfort clutching a walkie talkie. 

He fell into his usual routine for evenings like this. Putting his glasses back on he rose from his seat and paced to a nearby bookshelf and removed a thick leather bound album. Returning to his seat he flipped it open. 

A smile crossed his lips. 

El kept pictures for everything. Birthdays, christmas, everything. It had been that ever since they were kids, and so the couple had a running visual catalogue of everything since El had finally come out to the world in the fall of 1985. 

That was one of the first images. 

El surrounded by everyone outside the cabin, grinning genuinely for what might be the first time. 

When he moved to turn the page he felt it tugged from his grip. 

His eyes shot up. 

“Daddy?” 

Anna stood in the doorway, pink blanket clutched to her side and thumb firmly in her mouth. 

“Hey there, sweetheart,” he said softly. “Couldn’t sleep?” 

She didn’t answer. Instead she toddled over to him and he pulled her up into lap. There were tears in her big brown eyes. 

“Me neither,” he told her. 

The two of them sat like that for a time. Anna nuzzled into the crook of his arm. 

“Mama?” she asked, voice pitched upwards. 

“Mama will be home soon, sweetheart, I promise.” 

Tears thickened at the edge of her eyes, and she bit down on her thumb. Mike felt his heart catch in his chest. Those damn eyes. So much like her mothers. So big and full of emotions that a simple look could send him reeling. 

“Here, baby girl,” he said, rearranging the girl on his lap and showing the album. “Let me tell you a story. A few stories.” 

This brightened the girls mood. She took her thumb out of her mouth and she smiled. 

Years from now, when Anna was twelve years old and her baby brother Jimmy was nine, they would sit down much like this on another snow swept night and El would tell her the story of her life. Of what her childhood had been like, of the scars that had once marred her back before a mural of tattoos had covered them, of the unabridged story of how her and her father had met. 

She would be horrified. How could she not be? 

Anna’s mother was the strongest person she knew. 

Yet the story she told of her childhood made that strong, powerful woman quake and cry and...break. 

In the present however, she sat in her favorite place. Her daddy’s lap. 

“Mama,” she said, pointing at a picture. 

Mike smiled and nodded. 

That was an early photo. Taken just sixth months after she’d come back to them. She, Max, and the guys were piled high on the couch in Hopper’s cabin. Snack wrappers and chips were strewn about them like a hurricane had rolled through. The tv was playing Star Wars in the background and the whole lot of them were grinning like idiots. 

“Yep, that’s your mama and me,” he indicated his younger, gangly self who had his arm firmly wrapped around the young El’s shoulders. 

Seeming disinterested, Anna turned the page with a chubby fist. She clasped a handful of laminated pages and tugged. 

A shot of him and El looking thoroughly disheveled in large towels. Prom night. Lots of fun. Plenty of drinking that had resulted in an impromptu bout of skinny dipping. Follow by Max stealing their clothes. Hilarity followed. 

Anna flipped the pages again. 

These were from their wedding day. 

Really, apart from the tux and the white dress, these photos weren’t really all that different from the earlier ones. Same group of dumbasses making dumbass faces. Only slightly better groomed. 

One picture showed El and Hopper in the midst of their father-daughter dance. 

“And there’s you’re grandpa. He isn’t always grumpy, you know.” 

Especially not in front of his granddaughter. (Though Mike had long suspected that his father in law reserved a special scowl just for him. To fuck with him, because he thought it was hilarious.) 

“Pretty,” Anna chimed, running fingers across a shot of El in her dress. 

“The prettiest,” Mike agreed, hand finding its way to his daughter's mop of curls. It ached, how much she looked like her mother sometimes. Same inquisitive eyes. Same bright smiles. 

They flicked through the whole book. Anna listening (as best a two year old could) as Mike babbled on. Telling story after story. 

“This is from freshman year. Your uncle Will got into trouble and your mama….she got involved,” he said of a picture of El sporting a black eye. 

“That was our first real date. I don’t think I ever got that stain out of those pants.”

“Your Uncle Dustin had a lot of explaining to do that day.” 

Finally, they reached the back of the album, a picture that made Mike stop. 

He hadn’t put this one in here. He’d taken the photo though. 

It was the first day El had suited up to go out on a mission. She was smiling, though it was obvious that the body armor, light as it was, felt strange on her body. The orange face mask was clasped in one fist against her hip. 

Mike closed his eyes. He closed the book and set it aside. 

“Your mama is a superhero, Anna,” he told the girl in his lap. She looked up at him. Eyes meeting his, hanging on his words in a way he hadn’t thought possible for someone so young. “When I was little, I always pictured myself as a hero. A paladin.” 

He laughs, thinking back on the overprotective kid he’d been. 

“I always saw myself saving a beautiful princess. Like in all the stories I loved. The joke was on me, because when my princess showed up, she saved me instead.” He punctuated the thought by poking Anna’s nose. 

She giggled. 

“That’s what your mama does. She saves people. Always.” 

Perhaps El’s greatest flaw. She couldn’t NOT play hero. 

And Mike loved her for that. Even when it scared him. 

He held Anna close and closed his eyes. 

“She’ll be back, baby girl. She always comes back.” 

And he would be there when she did. Waiting wasn't so bad, when it was for her. 

 

El landed in her front yard at around four in the morning. 

The snowfall had subsided somewhat by then, so her flight hadn’t been as difficult as she’d thought it would be. Flying was an exhilarating experience. But pulling yourself through the air with telekinesis was far more difficult when the temperature was below zero and you were being bombarded by ice and sleet and snow. 

The incident had been….rough. 

Whatever schism that had opened the barrier between reality and the Upside Down had left a gate the size of a semi truck hanging over Castleton Mall, spewing out taint and monsters. Closing it had been easy. Dealing with what it had spat out had been far less so. The demogorgans had been fully grown and had found their way towards the movie theater at the malls center. Emergency teams had been able to evacuate most bystanders, but dispatching them had still been hard in such close proximity to other people. 

She'd come out of it with a scratch across one cheek. Nothing serious but it did sting. 

More than anything she was tired. It had taken a lot of power to do the job. Apart from using fire, the only proper way to kill a creature of the upside down was to rip it apart at the molecular level. Effective, but strenuous. 

She was so exhausted that she had little strength to peek into the void and call ahead home. The flight was barely manageable on it's own. 

Wobbly legged, she made her way towards the door, snow nearly to her knees. 

"You made it." 

El looked up. 

Leaning against one of the porch columns stood Kali, hands in her pockets, visibly bothered by the blistering cold. 

"You can go inside, you know," El told herself with a smile, climbing onto the porch beside her sister. She dusted herself free of snow and embraced the taller woman. They didn't see one another often. But they always stayed in touch, and when the other was in trouble, they would come running. Years from now Kali would save a young Anna's life when a government operate got too curious and approached the girl at the bus stop. 

Though her powers were of little use in fighting the Upside Down, Kali made perhaps the most effective bodyguard one could imagine. That was why El had called her. Imposing as her dad was, a fifty something man with a police sidearm was far less threatening than an illusionist with fire in her heart. 

"I know," Kali replied. "Just thought I'd wait for you. Damn, it got you good," she ran a finger down the mark on El's cheek. 

"It's nothing," it really wasn't. 

"And besides," Kali continued. "Didn't want to disturb that," she gestured at the window. 

El looked, and felt her heart melt. 

It surprised her sometimes how after all this time he could still do that to her. Then again, he had help now. 

Mike sat in his arm chair, fast asleep, Anna sprawled across his lap and chest. Both snoring loudly. 

Grateful to be home, El unlocked the door and entered. 

Fighting monsters wasn't so bad when this was what was waiting for you.


End file.
